Michael Larabel, reporting for Phoronix: This summer AMD announced the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer "RRA" as part of their developer software suite for helping to profile ray-tracing performance/issues on Windows and Linux with both Direct3D 12 and the Vulkan API. Initially the RRA 1.0 release was binary-only but now AMD has made good on their "GPUOpen" approach and made it open-source.

As noted back in my original article from July on the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer release: "Radeon Raytracing Analyzer is hosted on GitHub but the only content in the actual Git repository right now is documentation, so it would appear that at least initially this is a closed-source package though some documentation also says it's MIT licensed."

Last week that was cleared up with the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer source code going public. There are build instructions for compiling the RRA 1.0 sources on both Microsoft Windows and Linux while the Linux instructions are tailoring to Ubuntu use. Building the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer depends upon the Qt 5.15 toolkit.

Intel's latest plan to ward off rivals from high-performance computing workloads involves a CPU with large stacks of high-bandwidth memory and new kinds of accelerators, plus its long-awaited datacenter GPU that will go head-to-head against Nvidia's most powerful chips. From a report: After multiple delays, the x86 giant on Wednesday formally introduced the new Xeon CPU family formerly known as Sapphire Rapids HBM and its new datacenter GPU better known as Ponte Vecchio. Now you will know them as the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series, respectively, which were among the bevy of details shared by Intel today, including performance comparisons. These chips, set to arrive in early 2023 alongside the vanilla 4th generation Xeon Scalable CPUs, have been a source of curiosity within the HPC community for years because they will power the US Department of Energy's long-delayed Aurora supercomputer, which is expected to become the country's second exascale supercomputer and, consequently, one of the world's fastest.

In a briefing with journalists, Jeff McVeigh, the head of Intel's Super Compute Group, said the Max name represents the company's desire to maximize the bandwidth, compute and other capabilities for a wide range of HPC applications, whose primary users include governments, research labs, and corporations. McVeigh did admit that Intel has fumbled in how long it took the company to commercialize these chips, but he tried to spin the blunders into a higher purpose. "We're always going to be pushing the envelope. Sometimes that causes us to maybe not achieve it, but we're doing that in service of helping our developers, helping the ecosystem to help solve [the world's] biggest challenges," he said. [...] The Xeon Max Series will pack up to 56 performance cores, which are based on the same Golden Cove microarchitecture features as Intel's 12th-Gen Core CPUs, which debuted last year. Like the vanilla Sapphire Rapids chips coming next year, these chips will support DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link (CXL) 1.1, which will enable memory to be directly attached to the CPU over PCIe 5.0.

Cutting-edge semiconductor companies tweak specs to comply with export controls. From a report: Alibaba and start-up Biren Technology are tweaking their most advanced chip designs to reduce processing speeds and avoid US-imposed sanctions aimed at suppressing Chinese computing power. Alibaba, Biren, and other Chinese design houses have spent years and millions of dollars creating the blueprints for advanced processors to power the country's next generation of supercomputers, artificial intelligence algorithms and data centers. These are produced offshore by the world's biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. But sanctions announced by Washington last month that cap the processing power of any semiconductor shipped into China without a license have thrown a wrench into their ambitions.

Both Alibaba and Biren had already conducted expensive test runs of their latest chips at TSMC when Washington unveiled the controls. The rules have forced the companies to halt further production and make changes to their designs, according to six people briefed on the situation. They mark another blow for Alibaba, the tech group founded by billionaire Jack Ma. Its shares have lost 80 percent of their value since Beijing canceled sister group Ant's initial public offering two years ago. The group's new chip was to be its first graphics processing unit and was close to being unveiled, according to three people close to the matter. The US export controls extend to third-country chip manufacturers because almost all semiconductor fabrication plants use American components or software, meaning the rules may amount to an embargo on all high-end processors entering China. Washington earlier restricted such imports from California chip companies Nvidia and AMD.

Slashdot readers MojoKid and williamyf share the news of AMD's two new high-end graphics cards, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. "Priced at $999 and $899 respectively and available in December this year, the new Radeon cards are expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 and 4090," writes MojoKid. HotHardware reports: AMD states that its goals for RDNA 3 are to accelerate performance-per-watt leadership and to raise the bar for high resolution and high framerate gaming. AMD has turned to a chiplet architecture to accomplish these goals, a first for gaming GPUs. The chiplet complexes consist of a 5nm graphics compute die (GCD), which is flanked top and bottom by up to six 6nm memory and cache dice (MCD). The RX 7900 XTX uses the full complement of 6 MCDs which aggregates as a 384-bit memory bus (64-bit per die) with GDDR6 memory offering 20Gbps of throughput. The RX 7900 XT uses 5 MCDs with a corresponding 320-bit bus.

All of this increased bandwidth and resources translates to what AMD claims is up to a 1.7X uplift in performance for the Radeon RX 7900 XTX versus its previous gen Radeon RX 6950 XT card in high resolution gaming. This could put the card within striking distance of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 possibly, but it's hard to say until cards ship to independent reviewers for testing. Regardless, gamers will appreciate the RX 7900 XTX's price point versus NVIDIA's $1600 top-end beast.

It has been almost three years since Chromebook users got word that Steam support is coming to ChromeOS. We're still not totally there yet, but today Google announced that it's ready to enter beta testing. From a report: In a blog post, Zach Alcorn, Google product manager, announced that Steam on Chromebooks is available as a beta with ChromeOS 108.0.5359.24 and later. Steam on ChromeOS entered alpha in March, and Alcorn said the updates announced today are based on "thousands of gameplay reports." The Steam on ChromeOS alpha required not just an Intel CPU, but also an Intel 11th-gen Core i5 chip with Intel's Iris Xe graphics. The beta supports Intel's latest 12th-gen chips and extends support to Team Red. Alcorn said the beta supports AMD's Ryzen 5000 C-Series CPUs.

Fierce Electronics reports on "a complex legal battle in U.S. district court" between Qualcomm and Arm "over licensing of intellectual property with potentially far-reaching impact..." Normally, Arm licenses its architectural designs and related IP to chipmakers such as Nvidia or Qualcomm, which in turn produce chips that are then sold to OEMs that use those chips to make servers and other computers and devices. In an updated Qualcomm counterclaim made public Oct. 26, Qualcomm argues that Arm is no longer going to license its CPU designs after 2024 to Qualcomm and other chip companies under technology license agreements. Instead, Qualcomm asserts, Arm will only license to a broad array of device makers....

Arm has not yet formally responded to Qualcomm's latest counterclaim but told Fierce Electronics via email on Friday that Qualcomm's complaint is "riddled with inaccuracies" that Arm will address in a formal legal response in coming weeks....

[Analyst] Dylan Patel in SemiAnalysis also said the counterclaim shows Arm is not planning to allow external GPUs, NPUs or ISPs in Arm-based SoCs. "It seems that Arm is effectively bundling its other IP with the CPU IP in a take-it-or-leave-it model," Patel said. "That would mean Samsung's licensing deal with AMD for GPU or Mediatek with Imagination GPU is not longer allowed after 2024...." Qualcomm argues Arm is making it clear to the marketplace that "it will act recklessly and opportunistically, threatening the development of new and innovative products as a negotiating tactic, not because it has valid license and trademark claims."
Again, Arm has called Qualcomm's complaint "riddled with inaccuracies." Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates, tells Fierce Wireless that If Qualcomm's counterclaim is accurate, "this is a troubling step for the industry." If Arm were to get rid of tech licensing as described by Qualcomm, it would give rise to RISC-V use, something Arm "should be worried about," Gold said....

[Analyst] Patel has also questioned if Arm's original lawsuit is more than just about money and might be because Softbank (owner of Arm) and Arm remain angry that Qualcomm, as Patel puts it, worked with regulators to block Nvidia's $40 billion acquisition of Arm. After working for more than a year to seal the deal, Nvidia and SoftBank announced the termination of the proposed deal on Feb. 7, 2022, due to "significant regulatory challenges." Arm was expected to go public within a year, but an IPO has not occurred as of late October.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: AMD turned to advanced packaging to create chiplet designs and become a formidable CPU player again. Apple used the tech to beef up the power of its M1 Ultra chip. And Intel is pinning its future success on 2D and 3D multi-die packaging technologies as part of its ambitious comeback plan. Now TSMC, the world's largest contract chipmaker, wants to make chiplet-based products easier and faster to manufacture using its growing toolbox of advanced packaging tech that has already benefited the likes of AMD, Apple, and others. The Taiwanese foundry giant plans to do this through the formation of the 3DFabric Alliance, announced Thursday, which aims to help chip designers implement advanced packaging tech into their plans faster by collaborating with partner companies that are key to the development process.

TSMC's partners cover several important elements of chip development, from electronic design automation and memory to substrates and testing. As part of the new alliance, they will have early access to TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio of 3D silicon stacking and advanced packaging technologies. The goal is to allow these partners to build new solutions in parallel with the development of TSMC's 3DFabric tech so that chip designers can get their hands on the tools, technologies, materials, and other resources necessary to make multi-die chip packages faster. TSMC's 3DFabric portfolio includes brand-new technology, like system-on-integrated-chips (SoIC), which underpins the 3D V-Cache tech in AMD's Milan-X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D processors that came out this year. The portfolio also includes older technologies: integrated-fan-out and chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), which have received new iterations over the past several years. Those using CoWoS include Nvidia and Amazon Web Services. Representatives from AMD, Nvidia, and AWS gave support for the new alliance, which is one of several set up by TSMC as part of its Open Innovation Platform initiative. TSMC veep of R&D, LC Lu, said while advanced packaging technologies can "open the door to a new era of chip-level and system-level innovation," "extensive ecosystem collaboration" is required to "help designers navigate the best path through the myriad options and approaches available to them."

"Through the collective leadership of TSMC and our ecosystem partners, our 3DFabric Alliance offers customers an easy and flexible way to unlocking the power of 3D [integrated circuits] in their designs," he added.

Memtest86+ just got its first update after 9 years. The program has reportedly been rewritten from scratch and is back in active development. The new version, 6.0, features a plethora of updates to bring the application up to date, and support the latest system hardware from Intel and AMD. Tom's Hardware reports: For the uninitiated, MemTest86 was originally created back in the mid 1990s, and was one of the earliest DDR memory testing applications for personal computers. But development stopped in 2013 once Memtest86 was split into Memtest86 and Memtest86", with the former being bought by PassMark. Officially, we don't know why development stopped. But compared to the now modern Memtest86, Memtest86+ is the open-source variant.

Needless to say, version 6.00 features a lot of updates, which were required to bring it up to modern standards compared to the 2013 version. The new version includes completely rewritten code for UEFI-based motherboards, the modern version of a BIOS, for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the application. Furthermore, the application features added support for x64 long mode paging, support for up to 256 cores, added detection for DDR4 and DDR5 memory -- since DDR3 was the latest memory standard in 2013 -- and adds support for XMP version 3.0.

CPU support has been significantly enhanced, addingdetection for all pre-Zen and AMD Zen-based processors ranging from the Ryzen 1000 series to 7000 series, and any older parts that were made after 2013. Intel support has also been added for chips up to 13th gen Raptor Lake. Finally, the last patch notes indicate version 6.0 adds support for older Nvidia and AMD chipsets - probably pre-2010 since it mentions Nvidia nForce chipsets, along with numerous bug fixes, optimizations and enhancements.

Hardcore overclocker Elmor "officially broke the CPU frequency world record with Intel's brand-new Core i9-13900K 24-core processor," reports Tom's Hardware — by hitting "a staggering 8.812GHz using liquid nitrogen cooling, dethroning the 8-year reigning champion, the FX-8370, by 90MHz." That's right; it took eight years for a new CPU architecture to dethrone AMD's FX series processors. Those chips are infamous for their mediocre CPU performance at launch; however, these chips scaled incredibly well under liquid nitrogen overclocking....

Elmor accomplished this monumental feat thanks to Intel's new highly-clocked 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPU architecture. Out of the box, the Core i9-13900K can run over 5.5GHz on all P-cores while also hitting 5.8GHz under lightly threaded workloads. The 13900K is, by far, Intel's highest-clocking chip to date.

Nearly four years after its last major release, VirtualBox 7.0 arrives with a... host of new features. Chief among them are Windows 11 support via TPM, EFI Secure Boot support, full encryption for virtual machines, and a few Linux niceties. From a report: The big news is support for Secure Boot and TPM 1.2 and 2.0, which makes it easier to install Windows 11 without registry hacks (the kind Oracle recommended for 6.1 users). It's strange to think about people unable to satisfy Windows 11's security requirements on their physical hardware, but doing so with a couple clicks in VirtualBox, but here we are. VirtualBox 7.0 also allows virtual machines to run with full encryption, not just inside the guest OSâ"but logs, saved states, and other files connected to the VM. At the moment, this support only works through the command line, "for now," Oracle notes in the changelog.

This is the first official VirtualBox release with a Developer Preview for ARM-based Macs. Having loaded it on an M2 MacBook Air, I can report that the VirtualBox client informs you, extensively and consistently, about the non-production nature of your client. The changelog notes that it's an "unsupported work in progress" that is "known to have very modest performance." A "Beta Warning" shows up in the (new and unified) message center, and in the upper-right corner, a "BETA" warning on the window frame is stacked on top of a construction-style "Dev Preview" warning sign. It's still true that ARM-based Macs don't allow for running operating systems written for Intel or AMD-based processors inside virtual machines. You will, however, be able to run ARM-based Linux installations in macOS Venture that can themselves run x86 processors using Rosetta, Apple's own translation layer.

Arm might not think RISC-V is a threat to its newfound foothold in the datacenter, but growing pressure on Chinese chipmaking could ultimately change that, Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell tells The Register. From the report: Over the past few years the US has piled on export bans and trade restrictions on Chinese chipmakers in an effort to stall the country's semiconductor industry. This has included barring companies with ties to the Chinese military from purchasing x86 processors and AI kit from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. "Because the US-China trade war restricts x86 sales to China, Chinese infrastructure vendors and cloud providers need to adapt to remain in business," O'Donnell said. "They initially pivoted to Arm, but trade restrictions exist there too. Chinese players are showing great interest in RISC-V."

RISC-V provides China with a shortcut around the laborious prospect of developing their own architecture. "Coming up with a whole new architecture is nearly impossible," O'Donnell said. But "a design based on some architecture is very different from the architecture itself." So it should come as no surprise that the majority of RISC-V members are based in China, according to a report published last year. And the country's government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences is actively developing open source RISC-V performance processors.

Alibaba's T-Head, which is already deploying Arm server processors and smartNICs, is also exploring RISC-V-based platforms. But for now, they're largely limited to edge and IoT appliances. However, O'Donnell emphasizes that there is no technical reason that would prevent someone from developing a server-grade RISC-V chip. "Similar to Arm, many people dismiss RISC-V as underpowered for more demanding applications. They are wrong. Both are architectures, not specific designs. As such, one can design a powerful processor based on either architecture," he said. [...] One of the most attractive things about RISC-V over Softbank-owned Arm is the relatively low cost of building chips based on the tech, especially for highly commoditized use cases like embedded processors, O'Donnell explained. While nowhere as glamorous as something like a server CPU, embedded applications are one of RISC-V's first avenues into the datacenter. [...] These embedded applications are where O'Donnell expects RISC-V will see widespread adoption, including in the datacenter. Whether the open source ISA will rise to the level of Arm or x86 is another matter entirely.

The U.S. unveiled a set of new regulations Friday that aim to choke off China's access to advanced chips, the tools necessary to manufacture years-old designs, and the service and support mechanisms needed to keep chip fabrication systems running smoothly. From a report: On a briefing call with reporters Thursday, administration officials said the goal is to block the People's Liberation Army and China's domestic surveillance apparatus from gaining access to advanced computing capabilities that require the use of advanced semiconductors. The chips, tools, and software are helping China's military, including aiding the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the officials, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss the administration's policies freely.

The new rules are comprehensive, and cover a range of advanced semiconductor technology, from chips produced by the likes of AMD and Nvidia to the expensive, complex equipment needed to make those chips. Much of highest-quality chip manufacturing equipment is made by three U.S. companies: KLA, Applied Materials, and Lam Research, and cutting off China's access to their tools has the potential to damage the country's ambitions to become a chipmaking powerhouse. The Biden administration's new controls on chip exports represent a significant shift in U.S. policy related to China. For decades, the U.S. has attempted to keep China two generations of tech behind, typically by denying China access to the tools necessary to make advanced chips, or other technology, themselves. Now, the goal looks to be to cripple China's ability to produce chips with technology that is nearly a decade old, several generations behind the state-of-the-art capabilities.

Greg Lavender, CTO of Intel, spoke to VentureBeat about the company's efforts to help developers build applications that can run on any operating system. From the report: "Today in the accelerated computing and GPU world, you can use CUDA and then you can only run on an Nvidia GPU, or you can go use AMD's CUDA equivalent running on an AMD GPU,â Lavender told VentureBeat. "You can't use CUDA to program an Intel GPU, so what do you use?" That's where Intel is contributing heavily to the open-source SYCL specification (SYCL is pronounced like "sickle") that aims to do for GPU and accelerated computing what Java did decades ago for application development. Intel's investment in SYCL is not entirely selfless and isn't just about supporting an open-source effort; it's also about helping to steer more development toward its recently released consumer and data center GPUs. SYCL is an approach for data parallel programming in the C++ language and, according to Lavender, it looks a lot like CUDA.

To date, SYCL development has been managed by the Khronos Group, which is a multi-stakeholder organization that is helping to build out standards for parallel computing, virtual reality and 3D graphics. On June 1, Intel acquired Scottish development firm Codeplay Software, which is one of the leading contributors to the SYCL specification. "We should have an open programming language with extensions to C++ that are being standardized, that can run on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs without changing your code," Lavender said. Lavender is also a realist and he knows that there is a lot of code already written specifically for CUDA. That's why Intel developers built an open-source tool called SYCLomatic, which aims to migrate CUDA code into SYCL. Lavender claimed that SYCLomatic today has coverage for approximately 95% of all the functionality that is present in CUDA. He noted that the 5% SYCLomatic doesn't cover are capabilities that are specific to Nvidia hardware.

With SYCL, Lavender said that there are code libraries that developers can use that are device independent. The way that works is code is written by a developer once, and then SYCL can compile the code to work with whatever architecture is needed, be it for an Nvidia, AMD or Intel GPU. Looking forward, Lavender said that he's hopeful that SYCL can become a Linux Foundation project, to further enable participation and growth of the open-source effort. [...] "We should have write once, run everywhere for accelerated computing, and then let the market decide which GPU they want to use, and level the playing field," Lavender said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A stable version of Linux 6.0 is out, with 15,000 non-merge commits and a notable version number for the kernel. And while major Linux releases only happen when the prior number's dot numbers start looking too big -- there is literally no other reason" -- there are a lot of notable things rolled into this release besides a marking in time. Most notable among them could be a patch that prevents a nearly two-decade slowdown for AMD chips, based on workaround code for power management in the early 2000s that hung around for far too long. [...]

Intel's new Arc GPUs are supported in their discrete laptop form in 6.0 (though still experimental). Linux blog Phoronix notes that Intel's ARC GPUs all seem to run on open source upstream drivers, so support should show up for future Intel cards and chipsets as they arrive on the market. Linux 6.0 includes several hardware drivers of note: fourth-generation Intel Xeon server chips, the not-quite-out 13th-generation Raptor Lake and Meteor Lake chips, AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs, Threadripper CPUs, EPYC systems, and audio drivers for a number of newer AMD systems. One small, quirky addition points to larger things happening inside Linux. Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s, based on an ARM-powered Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, get some early support in 6.0. ARM support is something Linux founder Linus Torvalds is eager to see [...].

Among other changes you can find in Linux 6.0, as compiled by LWN.net (in part one and part two):
- ACPI and power management improvements for Sapphire Rapids CPUs
- Support for SMB3 file transfer inside Samba, while SMB1 is further deprecated
- More work on RISC-V, OpenRISC, and LoongArch technologies
- Intel Habana Labs Gaudi2 support, allowing hardware acceleration for machine-learning libraries
- A "guest vCPU stall detector" that can tell a host when a virtual client is frozen Ars' Kevin Purdy notes that in 2022, "there are patches in Linux 6.0 to help Atari's Falcon computers from the early 1990s (or their emulated descendants) better handle VGA modes, color, and other issues."

Not included in this release are Rust improvements, but they "are likely coming in the next point release, 6.1," writes Purdy.

Magic Leap's second take on augmented reality eyewear is available. "The glasses are still aimed at developers and pros, but they include a number of design upgrades that make them considerably more practical -- and point to where AR might be headed," reports Engadget. From the report: The design is 50 percent smaller and 20 percent lighter than the original. It should be more comfortable to wear over long periods, then. Magic Leap also promises better visibility for AR in bright light (think a well-lit office) thanks to "dynamic dimming" that makes virtual content appear more solid. Lens optics supposedly deliver higher quality imagery with easier-to-read text, and the company touts a wider field of view (70 degrees diagonal) than comparable wearables.

You can expect decent power that includes a quad-core AMD Zen 2-based processor in the "compute pack," a 12.6MP camera (plus a host of cameras for depth, eye tracking and field-of-view) and 60FPS hand tracking for gestures. You'll only get 3.5 hours of non-stop use, but the 256GB of storage (the most in any dedicated AR device, Magic Leap claims) provides room for more sophisticated apps. The base model of the glasses costs $3,299, with the Enterprise model amounting to about $5,000.

Most development effort in graphics drivers these days, whether you're talking about Nvidia, Intel, or AMD, is focused on new APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, increasingly advanced upscaling technologies, and specific improvements for new game releases. But this year, AMD has also been focusing on an old problem area for its graphics drivers: OpenGL performance. From a report: Over the summer, AMD released a rewritten OpenGL driver that it said would boost the performance of Minecraft by up to 79 percent (independent testing also found gains in other OpenGL games and benchmarks, though not always to the same degree). Now those same optimizations are coming to AMD's officially validated GPU drivers for its Radeon Pro-series workstation cards, providing big boosts to professional apps like Solidworks and Autodesk Maya. "The AMD Software: PRO Edition 22.Q3 driver has been tested and approved by Dell, HP, and Lenovo for stability and is available through their driver downloads," the company wrote in its blog post. "AMD continues to work with software developers to certify the latest drivers." Using a Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPU, AMD says that its new drivers can improve Solidworks rendering speeds by up to 52 or 28 percent at 4K and 1080p resolutions, respectively. Autodesk Maya performance goes up by 34 percent at 4K or 72 percent at the default resolution. The size of the improvements varies based on the app and the GPU, but AMD's testing shows significant, consistent improvements across the board on the Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and W6400 GPUs, improvements that AMD says will help those GPUs outpace analogous Nvidia workstation GPUs like the RTX A5000 and A2000 and the Nvidia T600.

AMD engineer K Prateek Nayak recently uncovered that a 20 year old chipset workaround in the Linux kernel still being applied to modern AMD systems is responsible in some cases for hurting performance on modern Zen hardware. Fortunately, a fix is on the way for limiting that workaround to old systems and in turn helping with performance for modern systems. Phoronix reports: Last week was a patch posted for the ACPI processor idle code to avoid an old chipset workaround on modern AMD Zen systems. Since ACPI support was added to the Linux kernel in 2002, there has been a "dummy wait op" to deal with some chipsets where STPCLK# doesn't get asserted in time. The dummy I/O read delays further instruction processing until the CPU is fully stopped. This was a problem with at least some AMD Athlon era systems with a VIA chipset... But not a problem with newer chipsets of roughly the past two decades.

With this workaround still being applied to even modern AMD systems, K Prateek Nayak discovered: "Sampling certain workloads with IBS on AMD Zen3 system shows that a significant amount of time is spent in the dummy op, which incorrectly gets accounted as C-State residency. A large C-State residency value can prime the cpuidle governor to recommend a deeper C-State during the subsequent idle instances, starting a vicious cycle, leading to performance degradation on workloads that rapidly switch between busy and idle phases. One such workload is tbench where a massive performance degradation can be observed during certain runs."

At least for Tbench, this long-time, unconditional workaround in the Linux kernel has been hurting AMD Ryzen / Threadripper / EPYC performance in select workloads. This workaround hasn't affected modern Intel systems since those newer Intel platforms use the alternative MWAIT-based intel_idle driver code path instead. The AMD patch evolved into this patch by Intel Linux engineer Dave Hansen. That patch to limit the "dummy wait" workaround to old systems is already queued into TIP's x86/urgent branch. With it going the route of "x86/urgent" and for fixing a overzealous workaround that isn't needed on modern hardware, it's likely this patch will be submitted this week still for the Linux 6.0 kernel rather than needing to wait until the next (v6.1) merge window.

Just one day after the Ethereum Merge, where the cryptocoin successfully switched from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS), profitability of GPU mining has completely collapsed. Tom's Hardware reports: That means the best graphics cards should finally be back where they belonged, in your gaming PC, just as god intended. That's a quick drop, considering yesterday there were still a few cryptocurrencies that were technically profitable. Looking at WhatToMine, and using the standard $0.10 per kWh, the best-case results are with the GeForce RTX 3090 and Radeon RX 6800 and 6800 XT. Those are technically showing slightly positive results, to the tune of around $0.06 per day after power costs. However, that doesn't factor in the cost of the PC power, or the wear and tear on your graphics card.

Even at a slightly positive net result, it would still take over 20 years to break even on the cost of an RX 6800. We say that tongue-in-cheek, because if there's one thing we know for certain, it's that no one can predict what the cryptocurrency market will look like even one year out, never mind 20 years in the future. It's a volatile market, and there are definitely lots of groups and individuals hoping to figure out a way to Make GPU Mining Profitable Again (MGMPA hats inbound...)

Of the 21 current generation graphics cards from the AMD RX 6000-series and the Nvidia RTX 30-series, only five are theoretically profitable right now, and those are all just barely in the black. This is using data from NiceHash and WhatToMine, so perhaps there are ways to tune other GPUs to get into the net positive, but the bottom line is that no one should be using GPUs for mining right now, and certainly not buying more GPUs for mining purposes. [You can see a full list of the current profitability of the current generation graphics cards here.]

UnknowingFool writes: After a decades long partnership with Nvidia, EVGA has announced they are ending their relationship. Citing conflicts with Nvidia, EVGA CEO Andrew Han said the company will not partner with Intel nor AMD, and will be exiting the GPU market completely. The company will continue to make existing RTX 30-series cards until their stock runs out but will not release a 4000 series card. YouTube channels JayZTwoCents and GamersNexus broke the news after sitting down with EVGA CEO Andrew Han to discuss his frustrations with Nvidia as a partner. Jon Peddie Research also published a brief article on the matter.

Tom's Hardware reports: We're here in Israel for Intel's Technology Tour 2022, where the company is sharing new information about its latest products, much of it under embargo until a later date. However, the company did share a slide touting that Raptor Lake is capable of operating at 6GHz at stock settings and that it has set a world overclocking record at 8GHz - obviously with liquid nitrogen (here's our deep dive on the 13th-Gen Intel processors). Intel also shared impressive performance projections for single- and multi-thread performance.

Notably, the peak of 6 GHz is 300 MHz faster than the 5.7 GHz for AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors, but Intel hasn't announced which product will hit that peak speed. We also aren't sure if a 6GHz chip will arrive with the first wave of chips or be a special edition 'KS' model. Intel also claimed that Raptor Lake will have a 15% gain in single-threaded performance and a 41% gain in multi-threaded, as measured by SPECintrate_2017 and compared to Alder Lake, and an overall '40% performance scaling.'